Packinghouse to Park
Kaleden Packinghouses
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Kaleden was initially developed by James Ritchie as a fruit growers’ paradise. Once the trees started to produce, packinghouses were required.
The fruit trees planted in 1910 began to produce in just three years, with sixty-seven boxes of apricots packed in Lapsley’s shed on the waterfront and shipped to Winnipeg. By 1915, apples started to come into production and after one year of trucking fruit to Penticton for packing, the Penticton Co-operative Growers provided facilities locally. In the beginning, they too used Lapsley’s shed or the hotel basement. By 1916, Muir Steuart had signed up some growers, hauling their fruit to Summerland for packing and the following year he built Kaleden’s first packinghouse on the site where the community hall now stands.
Pioneer Park
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A waterfront park in Kaleden had been envisioned even in the early days.
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James Ritchie, Kaleden’s founder, had designated Banbury, Ponderosa and Sickle Points as public recreation areas when Kaleden was first surveyed. However, that designation had not been registered when the First World War intervened, resulting in the bankruptcy of the English company financing Ritchie’s development of Kaleden. The creditors quickly sold the first two of these to private individuals. As a result, residents were constantly looking for an opportunity to remedy this loss of lakeshore property. The residents used a small portion of sandy beach just north of the packinghouse for swimming.
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